On Saturday and Sunday afternoon, Immersion participants will have an opportunity to “choose your own adventure” from a selection of 2-hour mini-workshops led by guest speakers, who are experts in their fields and have unique perspectives to offer to the compassion community.
Compassion as a Way of Life
with Neelama Eyres & Robert Cusick
🎥 Hear from Neelama about this session
This deeply experiential workshop explores compassion not simply as a feeling or concept, but as a skillful way of relating to suffering in ourselves, others, and the world. Drawing from contemplative wisdom traditions and modern compassion science, participants will engage in guided reflection, meditation, writing exercises, and relational dialogue to explore three core dimensions of compassion: recognizing suffering, meeting suffering skillfully, and discerning compassionate action in real-life situations. Through both inner inquiry and interactive practices, participants will deepen awareness of their habitual responses to life’s difficulties, while cultivating a more grounded, skillful, and sustainable orientation toward compassion as a way of life.
Applied Compassion Mindset: A Practical Approach to Purpose, Self-Kindness, and Nutrition
with Maryam Makowski, PhD (Sat, Oct 10th)
with Carlie Arbaugh, MD, MS (Sun, Oct 11th)
🎥 Hear from Maryam about this session and her keynote
An experiential session exploring how self-compassion can transform our relationship with food, nourishment, and well-being within busy, high-demand lives. Participants will explore practical and realistic approaches to healthy eating, recognizing that sustainable nourishment may look different for each person. The session will also examine common barriers to self-care in high-performance environments and how compassionate awareness can support more sustainable, energizing habits without perfectionism, shame, or guilt.
Compassion Training for Physicians and Psychologists
with Diana Adams, EdD
This experiential workshop offers a window into Compassion Training for Physicians and Psychologists, including the neuroscience of compassion, empathy, and empathic distress. Participants will explore how compassion training can help clinicians relate differently to the suffering they encounter in their work and lives. Dr. Adams will also lead a brief loving-kindness meditation and share insights from her Compassion Lab project, highlighting the range of responses people can have to contemplative practice and how those responses can inform teaching. The session offers participants both an experience of the practice and a glimpse into the broader course.
Compassion Training & Wellbeing in Healthcare: Joy & Professional Fulfillment
with Sara Owens Woodard, PhD & Bornali Basu, PhD
The Stanford Model of Occupational Wellbeing defines professional fulfillment as including happiness, meaning, contribution, self-worth, and satisfaction. Healthcare professionals are trained to focus on problems and fix them. In a challenging work environment operating from a threat focus, it can be easy to lose the ability to notice what’s good. This experiential workshop focuses on evidence-informed strategies and tools to cultivate joy and reconnect with meaning to balance frequent exposure to workplace stress and suffering.
Through guided practices and reflection, participants will explore techniques to intentionally amplify uplifting emotions to strengthen a growth mindset, enhance resilience and deepen interpersonal connection.
Human Capacity, Self-Compassion, and Sustainable Performance
with Sarah Deane & Al’ai Alvarez, MD
🎥 Hear from Sarah about this session
High-demand environments don’t just challenge us; they drain the energy we rely on to think clearly, regulate emotions, stay compassionate, and show up well for ourselves and others. In this interactive session, participants will learn how self-compassion and intentional energy management can help them sustain their capacity in the moments that demand the most from them. Energy management means understanding what drains and restores your mental, emotional, and physical capacity, then making practical choices that protect, renew, and direct that energy toward what matters most. Drawing on MEvolution’s energy framework and compassion research, participants will leave with greater awareness of their own energy patterns, simple strategies for interrupting perfectionism and depletion, and healthier rhythms that support resilience, recovery, and sustainable performance at work and in life.
Mindsets, Contemplative Practices, and Embodied Awareness
with Kris Evans, PhD(c)
🎥 Hear from Kris about this session
🎥 Check out Kris’ TED Talk
This experiential session explores the science of mindsets. The first half of the session will introduce recent research on how our beliefs influence attention, emotion, physiology, and behavior. Participants will learn about the power of mindsets and the psychological processes that help us recognize, work with, and intentionally shift them.
The second half of the session will move from theory to embodied practice through contemplative practices using yoga, breathwork, reflection, and guided awareness exercises. Participants will cultivate the presence, awareness, and flexibility needed to notice internal narratives, regulate unhelpful mindsets, and choose ways of relating to stress, challenge, themselves, and others that support health, resilience, compassion, and aligned action.
Compassion Quest: A Campus Adventure in Connection
Self-guided
A team-based experiential adventure across campus designed to cultivate connection, curiosity, reflection, and compassion through shared experiences. Participants will explore the campus in small groups of 4–5 while engaging in interactive challenges, reflective prompts, and collaborative activities centered on empathy, mindfulness, gratitude, and human connection. Blending movement, conversation, and playful exploration, this experience invites participants to slow down, engage more intentionally with one another, and discover moments of compassion in unexpected places.